Friday, August 22, 2014

I'm naturally happy when someone cites my blog and uses my data, as Alex Teu did in his post Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Aliveon TechCrunch. I'm less happy with the some of the conclusions Alex drew. Below the fold, I argue with him.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

More than three years ago, Ian Adams, Ethan Miller and I were inspired by a 2009 paper FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes from David Andersen et al at C-MU. They showed how a fabric of nodes, each with a small amount of flash memory and a very low-power processor, could process key-value queries as fast as a network of beefy servers using two orders of magnitude less power.

We put forward a storage architecture called DAWN: Durable Array of Wimpy Nodes, similar hardware but optimized for long-term storage. Its advantages were small form factor, durability, and very low running costs. We argued that these would outweigh the price premium for flash over disk. Recent developments are starting to make us look prophetic - details below the fold.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

The LOCKSS team are working with some countries to build in-country Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) to preserve the content such as e-journals and e-books that they pay for. Other countries are considering outsourcing their national archive of this content to foreign providers. One of the questions that countries ask about these efforts is "where is the data stored?" Recent developments in the US and the UK mean that this is no longer the right question to ask. Follow me below the fold to find out what the right question has become.

Monday, August 4, 2014

HGST announced today that they are demonstrating an SSD that is based on Phase-Change Memory (PCM), one of the technologies competing to take over as flash runs out of steam. The selling point of the SSD is that it is extremely fast:

The demonstration shows unprecedented SSD performance levels that are
achieved by utilizing a combination of HGST's new, latency-optimized
interface protocols with next-generation non-volatile memory components.
The SSD demonstration utilizes a PCIe interface and delivers three
million random read IOs per second of 512 bytes each when operating in a
queued environment and a random read access latency of 1.5 microseconds
(us) in non-queued settings, delivering results that cannot be achieved
with existing SSD architectures and NAND Flash memories. This
performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based
SSDs, resulting in a new class of block storage devices.